On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 07:59:13PM +0800, Uwe Dippel wrote: > On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 13:42:04 +0200, Bruno Rohee wrote: > > > /usr/ports/infrastructure/build/out-of-date > > > > Will give you a list of all outdated ports installed on your system. > > Uhh, what phantastic ! - I knew that was a dumby question. > > Can I nevertheless suggest to add this to the FAQ ? Yes, I checked and it > doesn't show anywhere. I think I am not the only one who would love to > know this. >
The main reason this is not in the FAQ is that this area of the system is still evolving quite fast. Here's a quick history of the OpenBSD ports tree: we've taken it from something that looked like FreeBSD and NetBSD. The first steps have been to speed it up, trim the fat down, and make it more reliable. Some stuff has been cut down: the ports tree doesn't cope with every change in source, you're instead expected to either follow -current or a branch. Package building has become more reliable, and all options are now encoded as flavors and multi-packages. Then the package tools themselves have been redesigned and rewritten to be reliable, and to allow for updates. The end user is expected to use binary packages, and package update is finally becoming easy, and usable, now that we know how to track shared libraries and other funny issues. There are also ways to update stuff from the ports tree, but everything is not finished yet. In fact, the reliable out-of-date you see now was just rewritten by Bernd Ahlers, and there is more stuff coming. Things are going to get better, but new functionality isn't always documented out front...
